It’s said that most success stories, including those in business, require a mixture of blood, sweat and tears.

For the Canadian brand KOTN, its creation tale certainly included one of these aforementioned elements (sweat) — but thankfully, not much in the way of blood or tears.

“The three of us were living in New York and there was this really hot summer,” Benjamin Sehl recalls with a laugh of the brand’s early days alongside co-founders Mackenzie Yeates and Rami Helali. “I was constantly sweating through all of my white T-shirts and they were just getting pretty gross. So, I was constantly needing to re-up on all of these basics pretty frequently.”

Sehl says he found himself faced with a decision of picking between cheaper options from bulk-buy bagged brands in the $5 to $10 range, or designer brands from the likes of Rag and Bone and James Perse, that were still offering plain white T-shirts — but with each one priced between $80 and $100.

The revolving buy-wear-buy scenario prompted the trio to ask themselves one question: Why is this there nothing on offer in between?

They started to look into the available offerings of T-shirts and other basics and found there was a gap in the market for quality pieces that didn’t carry a designer price tag, but also weren’t entirely disposable.

“Most people aren’t going to pay that much for a plain white T-shirt,” Sehl says of the missing middle market. “So, maybe we have something.”

And the seed that would eventually become KOTN was sewn.

KOTN Cropped Sweatshirt. $75 | Kotn.comJUSTIN_ARANHA /
Kotn

Armed with approximately $15,000 in savings, the trio set out to create a collection of pieces for the range, which started with nine men’s designs but has since grow to include T-shirts, sweatshirts, dresses and more for both men and women, which would be priced from $17 to $102 and designed with the “fewer but better” mentality of conscious consumerism.

“I’ve always been a proponent of buying fewer but better things,” Sehl says. “Our entire business doesn’t exist because our customers are buying every day. And I hope that they don’t because that means that are clothes aren’t holding up to the standard that we hope them to stand up to.”

But, before they could begin selling their line, effectively solving that middle-market clothing conundrum, they had to sort out the production process.

As it turns out, a family member of Helali was operating a farm specializing in the creation and processing of cotton in Egypt’s Nile Delta, where all Egyptian Cotton is grown. Deciding to explore the use of the premium material in their new line, the team delved deeper into the world of clothing production.

And they didn’t like what they discovered.

“As we started to dig into it, and realize exactly how the garment industry works and how things are made, we started to see all these problems,” Sehl says. “There is a huge lack of transparency in terms of where our clothes are coming from and how they’re made.”

And the problems went way beyond the factories, according to Sehl. They went direct to the farms.

“The way it traditionally works is, you contact a factory and you’re buying fabrics wholesale,” he says. “But most people don’t have transparency beyond the factory.

“You have to think about the yarn mills and the farms that all go into making your clothes. And nobody has any sort of idea what’s going on there.”

When Sehl, Yeates and Helali started to get on the ground and talk to the farmers in Egypt — which Sehl admits they did, “because we didn’t know what we were doing and we just thought that we had to start from scratch” — they realized that, at a farming level, things weren’t looking good.

“It was a pretty bad situation,” he recalls.

And, around the time the team was grappling with their discovery in 2015, Sehl says the Egyptian government decided to pull support funding for cotton farmers.

“Egyptian cotton had declined approximately 90 per cent from 2001 to 2015 when we were launching,” he says. So, they decided to bypass the traditional factory format, opting instead to do direct trade with the farmers in the hopes of providing more assistance to the operations than they would receive if they worked via a middleman.

“We first started with giving the 20-something farms we were working with subsidies, giving them fertilizer and other things to help them out,” Sehl says.

The assistance helped keep operations going, and improved the outlook of the farms that were working with KOTN. But, it wasn’t quite enough.

Young girls are pictured a school in Egypt that receives funding from the Canadian company KOTN.Nour El Refai /
Handout via KOTN

“One of the things we were noticing while we were there was the kids were sort of sitting around. And we saw kids working. These were children, so we asked, ‘Why aren’t these kids in school?’” Sehl says.

The closest schools, they discovered, were at least an hour’s drive away, and most families didn’t have access to a car.

“So, instead of going to school, these kids were either staying home and working,” Sehl says. “Or, for lots of girls, at the age of 13, they were being married off in order to reduce the financial burden on the families.”

The situation didn’t sit right with the co-founders. So, they decided to go beyond funding for fertilizer and cotton, adding education to their areas of emphasis for aid.

“We ended up looking at what we did in sales that year, and we decided to fund a public school, an elementary school for kids age 6-14,” Sehl says. “It was a 33-student, single-classroom Montessori-style school right near a number of our cotton farms.”

The KOTN team dictated the school boast a two-to-one female to male ratio in the school in order to promote education among young girls. But, when the trio went to check out the school, they realized there was still more to do in the Nile Delta community they were working with.

“These are kids who never had access to school before. And, when we went to go see them, that September when it opened, it was this pretty amazing thing,” he recalls. “But, we were looking around the perimeter and we saw all these other kids who were looking in and wondering why can’t they go to school.”

The village’s total number of kids was approximately 61, Sehl says. So, the only solution they felt, was to fund the creation of a second schoolhouse.

“We ended up, that Black Friday, donating 100 per cent of our proceeds to building the second school,” Sehl says. “It was $56,000.”

With the second school opened in late 2018, the KOTN team says a new goal has been set: to have four schools operating in the area by the end of this year, and 50 by the year 2025.

“We believe that is the minimum we can do in order to start seeing some real impact,” Sehl says of the goals.

With three bricks-and-mortar stores located in New York City, Toronto and, most recently, Vancouver’s Gastown neighbourhood — in addition to its growing online following of international customers, the KOTN team is confident they can reach that goal; while also offering sustainable clothing that people will actually still want to wear years from now.

“We want to not make too many assumptions about what’s going to happen,” Sehl says of their ambitious aims. “But, we want to stay focused on our goals and where we can make the biggest impact.”

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